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Oh god, did I really offer to do that? Well I guess it at least means someone read some part of that wall of text.

Neither story is actually as interesting as it may sound, and I have to be very careful about the dizzle one for fear of being unfairly demonising/outright libellous/breaking trusts.

We’ll start with TG/UO.

--

(At least, I think it was TG/UO, it’s been so long... I’m suddenly inclined to think UO is a euro group so the following doesn’t make sense, but I know it was two of the bigger communities so I’ll use those names for now)

Now, back in the day, TG and UO came to an agreement with regards to hardware: They’d share an absolutely massive server through a single provider, which’d let them defray costs and reduce administration overheads. It also let them keep their subcommunities, such as the TG aerosim wings, together. They’d still play separately because they had different crowds and approaches, but the idea was that they’d both work better and cheaper because of it. I have no idea if this is still how they operate. I haven’t paid any attention at all to other groups and only realised I’d committed a minor faux pas by accident.

Up in that second wall of text I explain what a good idea it was to go through RPS for recruitment rather than get into a drama-laiden fight on the bisforums. I wasn’t the only one who had this “great idea”.

In the very early days of what would become ARPS we had a lot of trouble with the server. BIS had donated a bunch of copies of Arrowhead to RPS to hand out as prizes just as BAF was releasing and Jim had organised a free server for a month with a cool provider called Jest (Jestservers.com). His plan was that he’d host a big session and write it up to give people one of those “you should really play this” diaries we all love.

(I somehow won one of the copies, and even got a mention in the eventual write up, though I don’t think they ever got around to handing out the copies of BAF that were supposed to be awarded for noteworthy play)

However, ARMA is not the most bug-free of games and to top it off some of the missions available on default dedicated servers are designed for listenservers and can cause the server to hang or crash. We bitched about this a bit. Probably a lot.

Now the leadership(s) of the TG/UO consortium had seen that this hugely popular pc gaming website was suddenly promoting their game of choice and that it wasn’t mentioning anything about the modding scene or communities, both of which are a huge part of arma to most players. To top it off a bunch of stupid newbies were complaining about the server being shit. They had the great idea of offering to help out the RPS crowd at their own expense, with a natural side-effect of an influx of new players to those groups. Let me be clear here: I’m pretty sure they were going to offer an actual server for designated sessions, not just invite people along to join the TG/UO groups. A pretty damn nice offer!

Except some idiot went and ruined it all by shilling for donations to set up an independent server, which being an explicit part of the RPS community sort of put a damper on potential incidental recruiting.

It’s ok though, such endeavours die all the time and it’s not like RPS itself is going to disappear overnight. Plus this stuff isn’t as easy as it sounds! The config files are insane! (NOBODY SAID OR THOUGHT THIS, I AM EMBELISHING FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT)

Then I started pinging for help on a few alternative forums, trying to find more details on setup than were covered in the Kelly’s Heroes guides. I bumped into the chief server admin for those groups and more and eventually wheedled a really useful wall of text out of him.

Eventually he signed off with “it’s kind of funny, I didn’t realise you were with that group. I’d already been instructed by the leadership to help those guys out”.

It was quite a bit later when I puzzled out the possible implications of that.

Now, saying I pissed them off is making a mountain out of a molehill. I’ve never been in contact with anyone from either group with the exception of that one admin and he didn’t say anything more than that one throwaway phrase. I’m pretty sure that the upper echelons of the consortium didn’t actually care that much, want us to fail, etc etc etc. But it’s also quite possible that if proto-ARPS hadn’t have fumbled around like it did one of the other groups would have gotten a mention and all the players. That was a pretty big boon for us around the time of the DayZ-gasm.

--

On Dizzle:(I have never spoken to him so as I disclaimed above I have to be very careful to not misrepresent him)

If you’ve watched the ShackTac videos you know a bit about Dizzle (yeah I could paste his name from the clipboard, but I like this way better). He’s very, very calm and methodical. He’s got great attention to detail (see the TTPP). He’s downright ruthless under the right conditions (see the video where he tricks someone on the other team into giving away all of that teams secrets before executing him, it’s pretty funny but holy shit). He’s also very, very driven (He, and shacktack as a whole, create content. Videos, training material, mods, etc). Then there’s the building of shacktac itself.

If you’ve ever thought about joining shacktac you might be aware of the application process. You apply, giving a bunch of details which are meant to tell them whether or not you’ll be a good fit for the community or a disruptive outlier. If you pass that, you get a one-to-one interview. It’s pretty in-depth as a recruitment process but obviously it works for ST and creates the kind of community Dizzle wants.

However, the applications are not taken at face value. Why would they be? It’s easy to google stuff. So there’s basically a background check process too – the name gets put into a search engine and checked. If there are related names recognised by the checkers, they might get hit up and asked for character references, that sort of thing.

Honestly it’s probably not that bad, but it does get to sounding a bit like “internet detective” / “dox” work, even if it is well intentioned. If he wasn’t working on VBS2 I could quite well see him working for an intelligence agency and it’s a little scary because it makes a computer game just so serious.

(NOTE: Different strokes for different folks and all. It’s not like he’s making everyone get a full body tattoo of his beard or something. It’s just an approach that is a little creepy in my view.)

I’ve also been told Dizzle likes to keep an eye on other communities, just in general. It helps to predict the metacommunity, and if you know another group is folding you can predict an increase in applications or something. The general observation thing is how Folk and ARPS got a mention on the shacktac blog – we hadn’t asked for it, it came out of the blue.

So yeah, all of this gives him a bit of mysticism that makes me slightly afraid of him.

(Also cannot confirm or deny sacrificing of virgins for wicked sick skills. It works in Dominions 3 so why not?)

He’s downright ruthless under the right conditions (see the video where he tricks someone on the other team into giving away all of that teams secrets before executing him, it’s pretty funny but holy shit)

Let’s stop making shit up and explain how shit got made up: How ARPS got those Aesthetics (name, logo, etc).

Easy one, this.

--

Most RPS related groups take the Rock, Paper, Shotgun pun and apply it to the game in question. Rifleman, Platoon, Sergeant? Eh. Rifleman, Pilot, Sniper? Ehhh.

When you start shilling for donations you have to be absolutely clear what the donations are relevant to. Once money is involved, things get serious. Remember that you can donate/subscribe to RPS itself. So because I was insecure about people accidentally donating to the wrong place (this never happened) I wanted us to be SLIGHTLY distinct. Also I was under the impression that we’d need permission to use a name-a-like or something. Turns out Jim and co don’t mind, I guess.

Anyway, nothing really seemed fit so we opted for the simplest: ARMA, (with), Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Regularly picked up as ARma Paper Shotgun. Also you can say the acronym itself like harps with a silent H and pretend you’re DED POSH WOT. There were probably some other early interpretations as well. The word “Auxiliary” rings a bell, but that might have been because I’ve been reading up on Rome again. RPS A-Team? Maybe. Don’t think so, though. Anyway, you get the point – there wasn’t an idea except “unique and special snowflake that is actually the same”.

The Herosquad stuff came later from former players Dartt and Ansob, mostly by osmosis. A subset of players started using “ARPS Herosquad” as a sort of joke after a couple of people had a really fun time during a frontpaged event and basically won the mission for the rest of the team. It’s sort of a worthless a gimmick/meme suffix along the lines of “Bravo Squad Best Squad” or something. It wasn’t offensive, politically loaded or completely asinine/stupid, so we made use of it. Unlike ARPS, A-RPS, etc etc it’s a nice little phrase that wasn’t already being domain squatted. Herosquad.org was purchased and basically to give us a nice easy redirect for IPs and info without having to fit everything into the first post of the single thread we had on the old wordpressbb forums RPS had back then. (( Apparently there’s more to the Herosquad thing that goes all the way back to Planetside 1 for Dartt and co, but I don’t know anything beyond that and it never became an issue that we hijacked it. ))

As far as I know, the only people to ever read the site were myself, a couple of steam chatters and the then-admins-now-hosts who proofed and helped provide the content.

It also hosted the squad.xml, including the logo.

The squad.xml is a neat little webpage that the game can be read and use to give players an in-game description, a logo. Most usefully, it can describe the group they’re part of. It’s free advertising and you get a cool picture on your truck when you’re set up properly. It also has the slight benefit of implying “these people hang out here a lot, you might want to listen to them” when used in conjunction with a server name or message of the day / connection notice.

I’d made myself one when I first got arma2 and spent a few weeks playing on a mix of public servers, heavily featuring that one Russian server with 500 slots (Berzerk?). I was playing solo at the time and the game was still new / buggy so I didn’t really click with MP but I thought the customisation thing was pretty cool. So I used that as a template and fixed up a new one for the group and offered to stick people on it. Washington pulled together the logo on request.

It might look like some horribly clichéd world-police gun-eagle-globe patch from a distance, but there was a little more thought to it than that. Obviously the gun is a shotgun. The bird is actually a crow. The default dead state in BIS’ games is respawning as a bird. In OpFlash it was a seagull. In Arma2 it got changed to a crow. (I’m not sure what it was in Arma1, probably the crow again? I skipped from OpFlash to A2).

That’s right, even when we played nothing but unstructured, over-gunned revive missions the group was always confident in (our ability to avoid) success. So much so that a sign of failure was in the logo!

(The rest of the logo is pure artisté-ry by Wash, who was going to have real difficulty fitting the shotgun and crow elements together without some sort of background element. I don't think even he can remember the exact process these days.)

Next was the motto. There was a motto? Yeah, there were a few. The first one to not just be a repeat of the ARPS name was “Non Audi Alexum”, or “Don’t Listen To Alex”. Alex was an early regular who liked to “fly” choppers. Into the ground. One time he managed to take out not one, but TWO choppers full of people in one go. He still has a reputation for crashing things. Anyway, injokes suck so we decided to replace it. A player who had recently returned from military service proposed “Spectumur Agendo”, translating to “Let us be judged by our actions”. Turns out that’s actually used by a few military units, but the intent was to say “Look at us have fun, why don’t you join in?”, not present ourselves as a mimic/realism community like the 99th Virtual MEU or whatever.

Again I don’t think that was ever picked up by anyone independently. It did get printed below the logo on some vehicles and aircraft, but the text was too long so a couple of characters would get cut off.

The descriptions people got on the squad.xml varied a lot.

A couple of them I took requests for. Some are straight up compliments (Washington’s “Superior Scenariosmith” was put in place after he made the first in-house mission) or complaints (Helios has “I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU FOR THAT HEADSHOT” after he sniped me in an adversarial where I’d just slaughtered an entire enemy fireteam and was looting the corpses. I'd have been more offensive if he'd been on my team at the time...).

Other times I'd get a request and twist it into something silly (Unaco wanted “First one in, last one out”, so I added “the buffet never saw it coming”).

Most were just my random insanity.

Harlander got “There can only be VON”. Highlander? In-game VoiceOverNetwork was unreliable as hell at the time so why not? Harakka got “Cutting the stomach, slicing the pie, staying frosty” from my reading his name as Hara-kiri and his professing a love for SWAT (use the LASH, pup!). Anthile used an avatar with a monocle and got “Utterly Monoculous”. Ebass got “No, YOU shut up” for his horrible, horrible microphone noises. ShowMeTheMonkey got an obvious “Zoologist? No, just a terrible criminal.” And so on.

The only thing left was a theme tune.

Unofficially I considered the group theme tune to be the intro song from Cannon Fodder.

War! Never been so much fun. Go to your Brother, Kill him with your gun, Leave him lying in his uniform, Dying in the sun. War!

I was the only one to think this was awesome though and it was only ever used in the single video I (badly) edited together. Kind of a shame, really. Though I did later make in-game binds to play a couple of riffs from a remix version of the track.

Thursdays, 7:30PM UK time (same as the other sessions, but on Thursday). So yeah, if you prefer that kind of playstyle, join us for that. If you prefer Folk style, play on Sundays and Tuesdays. If you don't care play on both. There's no reason that this community has to be exclusive in the way it plays/enjoys the game.

Edit: On using mumble - Some people, myself included, simply prefer it to TS3. Personally I'm a huge fan of its capabilities in audio attenuation (especially compared to TS3), and I know many prefer mumble's overlay. Other things mumble has going for it in my book are its sheer familiarity, and that it's an open source project.

It seems that the main argument for TS3 is the way it manages CC, and it's a valid one. I never had any issues putting up with the way mumble does things, but that said it is indeed cumbersome and complicated (particularly in setting up) relative to TS. It's all down to whether the bad outweighs the good, and when we had a similar discussion I seem to remember mumble winning the popular vote.

All of this is a moot point however (as indeed is the rest of this thread), as it seems that all the decisions have already been made; and that's what disappoints me most. Why were we not having this discussion sooner, before any "final sessions" or other such nonsense? I don't really check the forums that much so there may have been a poll I missed, but on the other hand I'm not willing to be Arthur Dent having his planet destroyed because he didn't check the demolition orders in his local planning department in Alpha Centauri.

The only major change is the move to TS3, lets just see how it goes. If it is a massive problem then changing things again in the future is not a massive issue but for now TS3 makes in session changes (moving people, disabling CC etc) easier and it is a bit easier for anyone new to CC as well. It makes little sense using two voip so lets try this for a bit.

Have another history essay, this one revolving around hardware. It might well be my last as I’m running out of ideas and don’t really fancy describing our evolution through M16 ACOG/MAAWS to M110/SMAW to Mk17 RCO EGLM/Utility to AK 74 to AK 74 Kobra (which took us from 8 man squads with in-squad marksmen, medics and engineers down to the 4 man sections in use today along with changing how we viewed revive). Also, this one is BLOODY LONG.

--

Over the years we went through several boxes. I’ve always maintained that as I rent them, take the donations, and so forth, I am the last authority. This was to avoid drama (see how well that worked out for me?)

It was also because I considered running a single server a surefire path to disaster. People eventually lose interest and move on. Arma2 is actually a real surprise in some ways because I enjoyed it for so long and others continue to do so. That said, if you check the names (slightly out of date for REASONS) on the donations, a good proportion of donors have indeed stopped playing.

So if we couldn’t run a single server we could run multiple ones and use the overall effect to get sufficient donations to run the server, right? Sort of like how Game Service Providers rent out a dozen different game servers on a single box. We’ve had instances of Minecraft, Brink, Red Orchestra 2, Mechwarrior: Living Legends, Mount & Blade: Warband and Killing Floor under the (A)RPS brand. None of them really earned any money but they were all fun for a while.

Let’s go back in time.

When Jim’s server from Jest ran out we got an offer to continue using it at the standard rate. By that point we knew that it was a hassle to maintain Arma servers and we were also vaguely aware that mods would probably require intervention by a hardware level admin (eg Jest himself), though JestServers is actually pretty great with Arma as they have some custom utilities that make things easier. The servers on offer were also in America and for a premium we could have affinity to a single, dedicated core. We could just about afford a 30 slot server. Or we could go elsewhere.

Most Game Service Providers/GSPs don’t offer Arma as a slotted server because it doesn’t fit the profitable pattern of “high bandwidth, low cpu”. A machine that can run 200+ good slots for CounterStrike: Source can’t handle Arma at all. Most GSPs like to buy prefab rack servers rather than bespoke setups. A select few go with higher end kit like Blades using Xeons, which are almost as good as bespoke stuff or desktop setups. Others grab cheaper unbranded 1Us that were cobbled together using parts cannibalised from the sale of old machines during the annual IT department upgrade at a local office of some multinational. The common factor is the use of processors designed for reliability and low energy consumption rather than raw power. Game server hardware lags ‘behind’ because most servers don’t need high end stuff. Physics are often client side, for example. It was only recently, when 64-player Red Orchestra 2 and Battlefield 3 matches got popular, that GSPs started shelling out for some more powerful kit.

There’s no real upper limit to the CPU an Arma server instance will eat. For most of the missions we’ve played, from 20-70 players with a proportional number of AI, I’ve seen the process eat up the entirety of one core and spread another 2-3 GHz of demand across other cores. Performance varies by mission a lot, but with some few notable exceptions we never had any real issues. A single instance will use up to about 700 megs of RAM, but I’ve seen it peak at 1.2 gigs or so on the Free server... usually shortly before a crash. You also need about 20-25 gigs of HDD space as the server uses all of the files of the client. I forget what the bandwidth usage tends towards, but a 100mbit line is generally standard and more than sufficient for well over a hundred simultaneous user and multiple voip servers. Windows is preferential simply because sometimes the linux server binaries lag behind a patch or contain unexpected bugs.

Back when we were looking to rent our first box most offerings were either a dual or quad 2.00 to 2.40 GHz CPU machines, commonly coming with about 100 GB of HDD and 1-4 GB of RAM. There were still a hell of a lot of Q6600 (Quad 2.66 GHz P4s) floating around, repurposed into new shells. I spent several days compiling various offers from different providers. I fired off a dozen or more emails and quickly got to know who the good providers were. Some never responded to any queries at all, others replied in ALL CAPS AND MISREAD THE QUESTION. Still others tried selling virtual servers (i.e. software on the machine splits the assets of the machine amongst users) as full servers (this doesn’t work unless you pay for the expensive software, as otherwise load spikes will interfere with other users. Fine on cheap webservers, useless for processor intensive activities like game servers). Two providers stood out: JestServers (dude REALLY knows his stuff and how to sell it, but his dedicated hardware choices tended to simply beyond the price point of many) and KillerCreation.

I spent our entire first wave of donations on a one-month lease of a dual 2.8 GHz P4, 2 GB of RAM, 100gb HDD box in London. It was pretty terrible and within a couple of days I’d double-dipped into my own pocket and upped us to a quad 2.66 Xeon machine (new chip, so the lower clock rate STILL did more lifting than the 2.8s) with 4 GB of RAM. KillerCreation were really great about the upgrade process, we got credit for the unused time on the weaker machine and a couple of days to transfer the files over. The new machine ran much better and towards the end of the month people realised that things were working out and actually started to donate a decent chunk of change.

Trivia for you: the server files used today originally came from the KillerCreation internal ftp, and were taken from an image of the German release of Arma2 prior to the English/international one. It was just so much easier to transfer the data between servers rather than upload a couple of DVDs myself. Copy protection applies only during patching for servers, and it only takes a few moments to find the correct registry entries to put your own key into the server! (Yes, all above water)

We stuck with KillerCreation for what I think was about eight months. We’d put up a mumble server because teamspeak3 was a pain in the rear end and wanted to know all of my personal details in addition to being clunkier. It’d only be much later that DrPiD and I would experiment enough to figure out how to restrict whispers by token, though.

Around our third or fourth frontpage’d event I asked in the comments for mission ideas. Enter Fer, who linked the Folk mission packs and recommended Fort, Moonless and Bend. Massively different from the repeats of Domination we’d been forced into before due to player counts. Also a hell of a lot easier for the server to run.

Shortly thereafter we had our first joint session. I later learned that folk was renting slots from Jest. We spent some time discussing the state of the world and eventually came to an agreement. For a small monthly sum (which I never actually enforced and ended up being a case of "Fer hosts stuff and we don't ask him for money"), Folk would move onto our hardware. This gave Folk hardware level access and effectively unlimited slots instead of the 20ish they had at the time. I guaranteed a dedicated core at all times and pointed out that so long as we were doing joint sessions, there’d be at least one other core free at all times, plus two that weren’t accounted for at all (but could conceivably have been in use for other games).

With the enhanced playercount and slightly more money I decided that the best way to get out of my Doctoral Thesis Blues was to look at the current hardware market. This time instead of looking at GSPs I went straight to datacentres. At this point, a 'little' company called OVH had started offering Sandy Bridge machines with SSDs. Cheap for what they were, expensive for our budget, but hella powerful. Oldmanbob had helped set up serverdoc, which let us manage server processes a little better, but I was still under the impression that our then-current box was struggling.

The following paragraph is in bold because IT IS (mostly) A JOKE:OVH offered a free months trial to business clients of any server they wished. So Fer got his papers back from the Cayman Islands and asked for a trial on the behalf of Folk and ARPS. We got an i5-2400 (quad 3.1 GHz), 16 GB of RAM and 2x1TB HDDs running under linux as a free trial for a month. At Fer’s request it was named K19.

This is where we first encountered issues with the Linux server binaries not being fully up to date. Linux is pretty awesome and I got some good stats logging and stuff running, but game developers basically assume you're hosting under Windows these days. Aside from the cases like Arma where there are sometimes bugs or delays, there are others that don’t have linux binaries at all. Even given Windows (or WINE) there are some REALLY obscure requirements for server software out there. Section 8: Prejudice stands out in my memory, as that required you to run an independent instance of GFWL with a unique key. Took people quite a while to figure out how to make that work under the "multiple servers, one box" model. There was also the mess that was Red Orchestra 2. Some of the big and popular GSPs I’d previously regarded as actually being less than stellar went on to prove themselves as such by throwing fits on the server admin mailing list about requirements and flaws that were entirely within their own heads.

One problem with Linux was the uploading of new missions. For some reason it’s actually a huge amount of effort to set up an FTP on a linux box that actually locks users in directories rather than giving them free listing of the entire file structure. On Windows you use the filezilla server and "job’s a good ‘un". Linux requires obscure daemons to be installed and configured and there aren’t any real readmes for it. So instead I installed a webserver stack and Head wrote a php script that, once I tidied it up, let people upload missions without having to use an FTP. (That’s how he earned “PHP? Phrrrrrpt.” as his squad.xml remark) It worked pretty well because the permissions (eg file locking) of Arma are much more forgiving under linux. You could even hot-delete missions!

But linux didn’t give us flexibility to host other games and even though I wrote a guide to its usage, nobody else wanted to put up with a command line interface through PuTTy.

At the end of the Free trial month I said a regretful goodbye to KillerCreation (Justin, the main man over there, bent over backwards trying to give me a better deal but just couldn’t match a Sandy Bridge machine) and budgetted up the extra cash (good GSPs like KC throw it in for free) for a Windows 2008 Web R2 box at OVH. We also switched to 2 x 128 GB SSDs at no extra cost, which helped keep disk access times down despite there now being three or four Arma instances running off a single set of files. K19-IIc was born.

The biggest non-Combined Ops resource hogs were Red Orchestra 2 (which I ended up capping at 48-50 players to avoid lag) and the Arma2 Free server, which basically needed to be set up with a 24-48 hour restart timer for fear of crashes.

Working under Windows was simply much easier for other people and that’s about where we leave off. After a little over a year(?) on the new box there are a couple of new deals from available but none have been worth the hassle of moving yet.

There are a few more months on K19-IIc before the Hosts have to figure out what they’re doing next. I’ll be separating the mumble server from that endeavour and have stopped taking donations for anything but that. Although I’m still legally liable for K19-IIc, I’m washing my hands of the hosting business and Arma. All donations made to date, totalling over TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS have gone directly to the Arma-related hardware as promised and without massive drama. (IceRaiser is responsible for a huge proportion of that money, so be sure to thank him.)

Aside: At one point I did price up outright buying a box and putting it through collocation (i.e. paying other people to house it, power it and connect it to the internet) but decided replacement guarantees and upgrade opportunities were worth more than what we’d have saved. The decision was almost instantly vindicated when K19-IIc’s power supply failed only a few months in. It was replaced four hours later at no cost to us.

--

On top of this were other incidental features I worked on because we had a server: the herosquad.org domain, multiple iterations of the website (nobody used any of them), a mission manager/hosting spreadsheet (which apparently was too complex for anyone but me to maintain despite it taking seconds for me to do so), tracking donations, and so on. At one point I hacked together a missions database that let you search by all sorts of criteria, but I never populated it.

Thus (probably) ends my tale of how being a blustering, ignorant, money-grabbing, workshy fool resulted in my having the ultimate power to ruin all of your fun.

Until recently I was paying less than £5 a month for a virtual machine with 50Mbyte/s download speed running an insanely fast web server. (That service also killed off. No way could they be making a profit on that)

Sadly they recently killed off their budget range where you could get something with similar specs to this:

OVH offered a free months trial to business clients of any server they wished. So Fer got his papers back from the Cayman Islands and asked for a trial on the behalf of Folk and ARPS. We got an i5-2400 (quad 3.1 GHz), 16 GB of RAM and 2x1TB HDDs running under linux as a free trial for a month. At Fer’s request it was named K19.

running debian for under £50 a month. I ran several source engine servers on it and the only problem I ran into to was issues with Linux and source servers. I'm certainly no linux whizz and because I was running it off my own pocket with a relatively poor paying job, I didn't want to shell out the extra fee for a windows license. A shame, really.

EDIT: They still provide it, just moved to the main OVH website

It really doesn't come across as a surprise to see Folk/Arps using them too.

There are a few more months on K19-IIc before the Hosts have to figure out what they’re doing next. I’ll be separating the mumble server from that endeavour and have stopped taking donations for anything but that. Although I’m still legally liable for K19-IIc, I’m washing my hands of the hosting business and Arma. All donations made to date, totalling over TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS have gone directly to the Arma-related hardware as promised and without massive drama. (IceRaiser is responsible for a huge proportion of that money, so be sure to thank him.)

Am I incorrect as interpreting this to mean you are letting the current server expire and leaving folk/arps to fend for itself?

(that almost sounds negative, but it's not how I meant it, and it is by all means your right to leave whenever you choose to leave)

Am I incorrect as interpreting this to mean you are letting the current server expire and leaving folk/arps to fend for itself?

(that almost sounds negative, but it's not how I meant it, and it is by all means your right to leave whenever you choose to leave)

Your interpretation is correct. I am not accepting further donations for the F/A server(s), which will expire when the current funds run out. The spare change will probably be passed on to whoever takes up the mantle at the end of the term, assuming nobody demands refunds. That won't be for several months as I paid for a quarter+ (to avoid having to make a payment on new years day) before this thread hit.

As a couple of people made donations explicitly for mumble I will be continuing to run that as an independent thing. Partly because I still use it myself. Hardware will change at some point, obviously.

I've long since stopped having fun with arma and obviously there's this entire thread so...

Originally Posted by SpecialSoup

OVH are fantastic. Simply brilliant.

Mhmm. We were first directed to look at Kimsufi but they didn't have the power. In the end it was a competition between Hetzner and OVH, who it turned out bought/owned Kimsufi.

It was actually good to try a Linux box even though we ended up going with a Windows one because stuff like bash scripting is occasionally useful in my current job.

Originally Posted by JimTheDog

Now I am terribly curious about what field Nullkigan was working on a thesis in.

My PhD is in Structural Engineering. Tangent: It's counterproductive to have a PhD in the 'real' world, and any company that says they're hurting for Science/Tech/Eng/Maths grads is lying through their teeth.

I bet you thought I was a Psych major studying the fine art of the Troll?

As a couple of people made donations explicitly for mumble I will be continuing to run that as an independent thing. Partly because I still use it myself. Hardware will change at some point, obviously.

Yay! I like mumble!

My PhD is in Structural Engineering. Tangent: It's counterproductive to have a PhD in the 'real' world, and any company that says they're hurting for Science/Tech/Eng/Maths grads is lying through their teeth.

I bet you thought I was a Psych major studying the fine art of the Troll?

No, that's cool. I was actually betting on something technical-but-academic. Structural Engineering sounds about right. Sadly it doesn't sound like it's necessarily something fun to quiz you about on mumble. Do you have facts about concrete, though?

My PhD is in Structural Engineering. Tangent: It's counterproductive to have a PhD in the 'real' world, and any company that says they're hurting for Science/Tech/Eng/Maths grads is lying through their teeth.

I bet you thought I was a Psych major studying the fine art of the Troll?

Nah, If you where a psych phd you would have been able to manipulate everyone this situation to your favor. :P